The Jesus Innoculation

First, let me get this off my back; if one more person repeats the phrase, "person of faith," I am going to puke on their shoes. You see, I just don't care what your religious beliefs are. Doesn't matter to me. You can believe that "god" is embodied in the form of a massive interstellar locust, which only appears every seven years. I don't care. More power to you. Maybe you believe that the mother-ship locust left behind the cicada which have begun singing again this summer..and are now busily repeating a religious chant that, if we just tried, we would understand. Don't care. Have fun.

So this leads me to my thought today. Clearly the GOP decided, and this goes back years, that the future of their party (and the associated platform of corporate avarice) could be accomplished by embracing evangelical religious beliefs. We all know this. The question, of course, is why.

It seems simple enough. If you get in bed with Jesus (or any religion, for that matter) no one alive can question your logic, because religions are, by their very nature, anti-logic. They exist on faith alone. This is what I call the "Jesus innoculation." Take a hypo full of Christian fundamentalism and all attempts to discuss or question a political issue are stopped dead, like a virus encountering a particularly effective vaccine.

Religion is the great debate ender. It's tantamount to the eternal parental scold, "Because I said so!" And this is exactly why this has been so successful for the Republican's. They have managed to stifle, and in most cases, eliminate debate on many of the important social issues of the day. They have come down from the mount with the Ten Commandments (we used to call this a political platform) and made life simple for the simple. No longer to people have to think; all they have to do is "believe."

For many, many American's, this is very heady stuff. On one hand, it allows them to feel like they are part of a large and important "movement." On the other hand, they no longer have to support their political beliefs with something messy and difficult like facts and logic.

The bonus round in all of this is that it also means anyone who doesn't believe like you can be attacked as a heathen non-believer who, because of that, is morally suspect. Takes us back, unfortunately, to "people of faith." While I don't have it in me to excuse the dolts who have been duped by this long-term policy, I do, at times, feel sorry for them. I honestly believe that most are completely unaware of how they are being manipulated by a cadre of very wealthy forces, whose real religion is centered on a once-walled street on the island of Manhattan.